“I have not yet told you, my dear boy, where I mean to take you tonight,” he said, taking Victurnien’s hands and tapping on them. “You are going to see Mlle. des Touches; all the pretty women with any pretensions to wit will be at her house en petit comité. Literature, art, poetry, any sort of genius, in short, is held in great esteem there. It is one of our old-world bureaux d’esprit, with a veneer of monarchical doctrine, the livery of this present age.”
“It is sometimes as tiresome and tedious there as a pair of new boots, but there are women with whom you cannot meet anywhere else,” said de Marsay.
“If all the poets who went there to rub up their muse were like our friend here,” said Rastignac, tapping Blondet familiarly on the shoulder, “we should have some fun. But a plague of odes, and ballads, and driveling meditations, and novels with wide margins, pervades the sofas and the atmosphere.”
“I don’t dislike them,” said de Marsay, “so long as they corrupt girls’ minds, and don’t spoil women.”
“Gentlemen,” smiled Blondet, “you are encroaching on my field of literature.”
“You need not talk. You have robbed us of the most charming woman in the world, you lucky rogue; we may be allowed to steal your less brilliant ideas,” cried Rastignac.
“Yes, he is a lucky rascal,” said the Vidame, and he twitched Blondet’s ear. “But perhaps Victurnien here will be luckier still this evening—”
“Already!” exclaimed de Marsay. “Why, he only came here a month ago; he has scarcely had time to shake the dust of his old manor house off his feet, to wipe off the brine in which his aunt kept him preserved; he has only just set up a decent horse, a tilbury in the latest style, a groom—”
“No, no, not a groom,” interrupted Rastignac; “he has some sort of an agricultural laborer that he brought with him ‘from his place.’ Buisson, who understands a livery as well as most, declared that the man was physically incapable of wearing a jacket.”
“I will tell you what, you ought to have modeled yourself on Beaudenord,” the Vidame said seriously. “He has this advantage over all of you, my young friends, he has a genuine specimen of the English tiger—”
“Just see, gentlemen, what the noblesse have come to in France!” cried Victurnien. “For them the one important thing is to have a tiger, a thoroughbred, and baubles—”
“Bless me!” said Blondet. “ ‘This gentleman’s good sense at times appalls me.’—Well, yes, young moralist, you nobles have come to that. You have not even left to you that lustre of lavish expenditure for which the dear Vidame was famous fifty years ago. We revel on a second floor in the Rue Montorgueil. There are no more wars with the Cardinal, no Field of the Cloth of Gold. You, Comte d’Esgrignon, in short, are supping in the company of one Blondet, younger son of a miserable provincial magistrate, with whom you would not shake hands down yonder; and in ten years’ time you may sit beside him among peers of the realm. Believe in yourself after that, if you can.”
“Ah, well,” said Rastignac, “we have passed from action to thought, from brute force to force of intellect, we are talking—”
“Let us not talk of our reverses,” protested the Vidame; “I have made up my mind to die merrily. If our friend here has not a tiger as yet, he comes of a race of lions, and can dispense with one.”
“He cannot do without a tiger,” said Blondet; “he is too newly come to town.”
“His elegance may be new as yet,” returned de Marsay, “but we are adopting it. He is worthy of us, he understands his age, he has brains, he is nobly born and gently bred; we are going to like him, and serve him, and push him—”
“Whither?” inquired Blondet.
“Inquisitive soul!” said Rastignac.
“With whom will he take up tonight?” de Marsay asked.
“With a whole seraglio,” said the Vidame.
“Plague take it! What can we have done that the dear Vidame is punishing us by keeping his word to the infanta? I should be pitiable indeed if I did not know her—”
“And I was once a coxcomb even as he,” said the Vidame, indicating de Marsay.
The conversation continued pitched in the same key, charmingly scandalous, and agreeably corrupt. The dinner went off very pleasantly. Rastignac and de Marsay went to the Opéra with the Vidame and Victurnien, with a view to following them afterwards to Mlle. des Touches’ salon. And thither, accordingly, this pair of rakes betook themselves, calculating that by that time the tragedy would have been read; for of all things to be taken between eleven and twelve o’clock at night, a tragedy in their opinion was the most unwholesome. They went to keep a watch on Victurnien and to embarrass him, a piece of schoolboys’s mischief embittered by a jealous dandy’s spite. But Victurnien was gifted with that page’s effrontery which is a great help to ease of manner; and Rastignac, watching him as he made his entrance, was surprised to see how quickly he caught the tone of the moment.
“That young d’Esgrignon will go far, will he not?” he said, addressing his companion.
“That is as may be,” returned de Marsay, “but he is in a fair way.”
The Vidame introduced his young friend to one of the most amiable and frivolous duchesses of the day, a lady whose adventures caused an explosion five years later. Just then, however, she was in the full blaze of her glory; she had been suspected, it is true, of equivocal conduct; but suspicion, while it is still suspicion and not proof, marks a woman out with the kind of distinction which slander gives to a man. Nonentities are never slandered; they chafe because they are left in peace. This woman was, in fact, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, a daughter of the d’Uxelles; her
